For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (Patricia B. McConnell)

A study of doggie emotions, a love song for dogs, and a tribute to Cool Hand Luke, the best dog ever!

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Quotes:
We’ve long known that you can stimulate different areas of the brain with a mild electrical current to evoke feelings of fear, sadness, or amusement. What’s most remarkable about those cases is that the research subject, wide awake and in no pain, always comes up with an intellectual explanation for his or her feelings after the emotion is elicited.
There’s a long list of surprising ways you can influence your emotions by changing what you’re doing with your body.
Before the invention of things like caramel corn and Krispy Kremes, what made us feel good was good for us.
dogs aren’t disgusted by poop. They love the stuff. Eating feces, whether that of another dog or a pile deposited by sheep or horses, seems to be a highlight in the life of many a dog. [...] Dogs aren’t people, and if they have their own image of heaven, it most likely involves poop.
Accurate, objective observation is a skill that requires practice, but it starts with asking your mind to focus on what you see, not on what you think it means.[...] A very small amount of time and energy spent in reminding your brain to make accurate, objective descriptions of your dog can radically improve the relationship between you and your dog.
One of the most important things to notice about a dog’s face is whether her mouth is open or closed. Relaxed, happy dogs tend to have relaxed and often slightly open mouths.
A stiff body and a closed mouth are signs of a dog on high alert, whose next move may be to lunge forward. [...] Dogs frequently use “freeze” as a signal to other dogs. If you see two dogs greeting each other who are both stiff and still for more than a second or two, you’d better do something to break the tension. Things might get dramatic if you don’t.
Mounting in play isn’t about sex, it’s about social status
Groomers and trainers know to go on alert when a dog abruptly whips her head around toward their hand and freezes her body for a microsecond. I take it as a threat, a clear warning not to repeat what I just did. If a dog does this with a closed jaw, she is most likely communicating to you that she is objecting to what you are doing.
The usual approach of all people, when greeting human or dog, is basically the opposite of a polite approach in dog society. Dogs approach one another from the side, curving their line of approach and avoiding eye contact, while keeping their bodies loose and fluid. We do the opposite: we keep our bodies upright and relatively still, and make direct eye contact while reaching out with our paws before we’ve even so much as exchanged scents.
Tail wagging is most commonly interpreted as a signal of friendliness, but that can be a big mistake. What is friendly is a loose, relaxed tail that wags the hindquarters along with it.
a dog with wrinkles around her eyes is a dog who’s glad to see you
dogs spend a lot of energy avoiding direct eye contact with one another unless they are good buddies
Eugene Morton, who suggested that the vocalizations of all mammals follow certain general principles. Sounds related to offense tend to be low in pitch and “noisy,” like a low, growly bark, while sounds related to fear or appeasement tend to be higher pitched and more pure in tone, like the yelp of a frightened puppy. Excitement also tends to raise pitch
the only thing two trainers will agree on is that the third trainer doesn’t know what she’s talking about
if dogs grow up with little environmental stimulation they can turn into adults who are lacking in the ability to handle even minor stress. Stress is just change, after all
because each of us has a different cortex, each of us lives in a slightly different world.
Animals who don’t feel fear aren’t going to live long enough to reproduce: it’s as simple as that.
Temple Grandin says, “Fear is so bad for animals, I think it’s worse than pain.”
Researchers have found that people who express no preference for using one hand or the other have higher than expected levels of generalized anxiety disorders. [...] You may be interested to know that out of forty-eight dogs, twenty-one were “lefties,” sixteen used their right paws most often, and eleven were “ambilateral,” showing no preference. That is, of course, very different from humans, of whom about 10 percent are left-handed or ambidextrous and 90 percent are right-handed.
shyness is a “conservative” trait, so it’s going to hang around in the gene pool, even if only somewhere in the background
Actually, that pretty well sums up all of dog training. If people stopped yelling “No!” at their dogs, and instead taught them what they want them to do, rather than not do, the world would be a better place.
I should state for the record here that I have never bitten a dentist—a fact of which, given my level of terror when someone jams a huge needle into my mouth, I am very proud.
every good treatment plan begins with a management plan to ensure the safety of your dog and your friends, and, as important, to prevent your dog from being conditioned in the wrong direction.
This is also why it can be dangerous to use a strong physical correction on some dogs: engaging in battle with a dog who is already pumped up for a fight can make things worse. [...] This is a situation you want to avoid: fights don’t always have winners, and too often the result is that both of you end up losing.
The simplest and most effective way to help a dog learn emotional control is to teach her to “stay” on cue.
Don’t fool yourself: if you yell at your dog for something he did twenty seconds ago, you’re not training him; you’re merely expressing your own anger.
Don’t try to solve the problem during the crisis; find a way to finesse yourself out of it.
don’t decrease your dog’s frequency of reinforcement until you’re willing to bet ten dollars that your dog will do what you ask
Greyhounds, for example, are the original couch potato dog, just as happy to stay inside when it’s raining as you are.
Your dog is much more likely to come if you turn your body sideways and move backward a bit while you call “Come!”
Keep this in mind with your own dog. She is who she is, and the key to her happiness is knowing what parts of her you can change through training and conditioning (which, don’t get me wrong, is a lot), and what parts of her need to be accepted and celebrated.
Like us, dogs enjoy petting during quiet times, when the pack is settled in, cozied up in the living room or bedroom, the outside world shut away for awhile. They enjoy petting least when they’re in high-arousal play mode. [...] In general, dogs enjoy touch most on the sides of their heads, under their ears and chins, on their chests and bellies, and at the base of their tails. [...]I wish we’d talk more about “rubbing, stroking, or massaging” dogs instead of “petting” them, “petting” being a word close enough to “patting” to cause no end of trouble. Pats, especially rapidly repeated ones on top of the head, tend to put dogs off.
it’s time to stop apologizing for the belief that animals, like our dogs, have emotions. Of course, our dogs can experience emotions like fear, anger, happiness, and jealousy
In some ways, it’s really that simple, isn’t it? At their best, that is what dogs do: they make us happy. At our best, we make them happy, too. That can only be true because we share so very much with them, and the foundation of what we share is our emotions. Dogs are emotions—living breathing embodiments of fear and anger and joy, emotions we can read on their faces as clearly as any language.